April 20 , 2016
Web technologies provide teachers with limitless possibilities to create challenging and engaging content to use with students in class. There is now a wide variety of easy to use and free web tools teachers can use to enrich their curricula and diversity their teachable content in such a way that attends to multiple learning styles. In today’s post we are sharing with you a set of excellent tools to help you create interactive lessons. More specifically, using these tools will enable you to add different multimedia materials to your lessons including videos, questions, images, hyperlinks… and create engaging learning experiences in class. All of these tools have been featured in different posts in the past. Enjoy

'TED Ed is a website that allows teachers to create lessons around YouTube videos. Teachers can select YouTube videos and use their URLs to add questions in different formats. The added value of this tool is that it has a section where teachers can track stats of how many have responded to answers or have seen the lesson. Check out this visual guide to learn more about how to create video lessons using TED Ed.'

'DocentEDU is a great web tool and mobile app to use with your students. It is particularly ideal for both Blended and Flipped learning classrooms. DocentEDU allows you to easily turn any webpage or published Google Doc into an interactive lesson where you add comments, private discussions, highlight passages, embed videos/maps/ simulations/quizzes, add questions and many more. When students log in to the website they will be able to see all the annotations, questions and content you have added. Students can also use DocentEDU to take their notes and add their own annotations to the text.'

‘If you use videos in the classroom, EDpuzzle is a must have. Take any video from YouTube, Khan Academy, Learn Zillion, etc. make it perfect for your classroom and more engaging for your students. Make any video a true lesson by making it to the point, personal and effective, plus get all the data about your students so you know if they truly understand the lesson.’

‘Backed by AT&T and Stanford's startX, PlayPosit (fka eduCanon) is an online learning environment to create and share interactive video lessons. Teachers begin with any online video (screencasts, Khan Academy, TED, etc.) and transform what is traditionally passive content into an active experience for students, with time-embedded activities. Awarded the "best open educational resource", PlayPosit is designed for K-corporate, flipped, and blended environments.’